New York Times' website goes down

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New York Times website, apps were down Wednesday

The outage had lasted more than two hours

Paper says outage coincided with routine maintenance

The New York Times' website and mobile apps went down for more than three hours Wednesday, the apparent result of an "internal issue," according to the company.

"The outage occurred within seconds of a scheduled maintenance update, which we believe was the cause," Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said Wednesday afternoon. "We are in the process of fully restoring access to the site."

The site went down sometime after 10 a.m. ET. The outage appeared to be lifting shortly after 1 p.m., when the site became accessible again to many users.

"We believe the outage is the result of an internal issue, which we expect to be resolved soon," Murphy, vice president of communications for the newspaper, tweeted at 12:47 p.m. ET.

"The New York Times Web site is experiencing technical difficulties," the paper wrote earlier on its main Twitter feed. "We expect to be back up shortly."

On Twitter and other social media, people were reacting to the outage, sometimes with humor.

"NYTimes.com is down," tweeted Renda Morton, a designer at the paper. "Luckily we printed it out for you last night. $2."

"The NYTimes Website right now has taken the need for "more white space" a little too literally," tweeted Nick Bilton, a New York Times technology columnist.

It was not immediately clear Wednesday what caused the problem.

During the outage, the Times was posting text versions of its top stories, including coverage of violence in Egypt, on its Facebook page.

The Times has been targeted by hackers in the past. The newspaper announced in January that Chinese hackers had carried out sustained attacks on its computer systems.